News Release

BOSTON – (September 17, 2013) – The First Helmholtz Diabetes Lecture Award will be presented to C. Ronald Kahn, M.D. at the upcoming Helmholtz-Nature Medicine Diabetes Conference. Dr Kahn is a resident of Newton, MA, and Chief Academic Officer of Joslin Diabetes Center. He will receive this honor at the conference on September 22 - 24, 2013 in Munich, Germany.

The Helmholtz Diabetes Award recognizes the lifetime achievements of a senior leader in the field of diabetes research.

“I was surprised and pleased that my work is recognized by this new lifetime achievement award, and having this award occur at a great meeting and in connection with Nature Medicine makes the award even more prestigious,” said Dr. Kahn.

“We couldn’t be more excited that Dr. Kahn is accepting this award,” said Dr. Matthias Tschöp, Director of the Helmholtz Diabetes Center in Munich and co-organizer of the conference. “Dr. Kahn repeatedly has transformed the way we think about insulin action and metabolic control.”

This conference will bring together the top leaders in the field of diabetes to organize the identification of, and potential solutions to, the challenges facing the prevention and treatment of type 2 diabetes.

In addition to his role as Chief Academic Officer at Joslin, Dr. Kahn is head of Joslin’s Integrative Physiology and Metabolism section and the Mary K. Iacocca Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1981 when he joined Joslin as Research Director for two decades. He then served as Joslin’s President from 2000 - 2007. Under his leadership, Joslin’s research grew more than 20-fold, and clinical and educational activity tripled.

Dr. Kahn is also a renowned investigator of insulin signal transduction and the mechanisms of altered signaling in disease. His laboratory discovered the insulin receptor kinase, its two primary substrates and the molecular components of the insulin-signaling network. He was the first to define alterations in the signaling network in type 2 diabetes, including the important role of insulin action in unexpected tissues such as brain, both in physiologic regulation and potentially in development of Alzheimer’s Disease.